Airborne Troops as a Tactical and Operative Military Revolution

by Tal Tovy

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In 1898, Jan Bloch published six volumes dealing with future warfare entitled The Future of War in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations. The book examines military technological developments and the techno-tactics at the end of the 19th century. As we know from history, about 15 years after the publication of the book the First World War broke out and Bloch's predictions about future warfare were almost exactly realized. But his perceptions regarding this were not accepted by his contemporaries, especially not by the senior military officers in Germany and France.

The character and range of the war surprised the higher military command of all the countries that participated in the war, which led especially on the Western front to a state of immobility.

Bloch was not the only one who foresaw the changes in the future battlefield. For example, already in the 1880s, General Sheridan, the commander of the American Army, envisioned the new character of war operations that would constitute the main methods of warfare on the Western front in Europe during the course of the First World War. From an analysis of the American Civil War (1861-1865) in which he had participated, and of the Franco-German War (1870-1871) in which he served as an observer, Sheridan claimed that the rival armies would protect themselves in dugouts and that any side that tried to go out on a direct frontal attack against enemy lines would be destroyed. Sheridan's estimate was derived from the understanding that improvements in firepower, in the rate and precision of firing, made war far more lethal and destructive.

As said before, most of the senior officer rank in Europe failed to understand the changing nature of warfare as a result of technological developments at the techno-tactical level. The immediate intellectual challenge was to comprehend the future aspects of warfare in connection with the rapid technological changes. Today the commonly accepted term for this process is Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA).

Research in military history has proved that in many cases it was these new technologies that changed the nature of warfare. Whichever side was wise enough to develop new technologies and to integrate them into new warfare doctrines had a decisive advantage. This article attempts to claim that the operation of airborne forces during the Second World War was a military revolution at the tactical and operational level. The basis for this claim is that the activation of airborne forces led to an essential change in the perception of the concept Line of Communication (LOC). The article will first examine the sources for the use of the concept RMA and the classical aspect of the concept LOC. This is in order to provide a theoretical dimension for the examination of historical test cases. Following this, through a discussion of a number of airborne campaigns that were conducted during the Second World War, the article will exemplify these tactical and operational changes in the LOC concept.

The geophysical nature of the LOC concept constituted a paradigm for thousands of years. From the middle of the 18th century extensive theoretical literature on the subject began to be written. By an analysis of paratroop operations during the Second World War we shall try to determine whether this new operational perception was able to undermine the basic foundations of the classical LOC paradigm.

During the war, a number of airborne campaigns were carried out in all the war arenas and in the various forces. A study of geographical distribution shows that most of the campaigns including the largest ones (at the division level and above) were carried out in the arena of Western Europe first by Germany and later by the United States and Britain, and therefore the article will be focused on an analysis of the campaigns in this arena.

Historiography concerning the operation of paratroop forces during the Second World War deals mainly with the military dimension. This means their practical activation in the various battlefields and an analysis of the success or failure of this or that operation. Therefore one may divide the research literature on paratroop forces into two main groups. The first group consists of discussions about those operations in the framework of a general discussion about the military history of the Second World War. The second group consists of studies that deal only with a discussion and analysis of operations in books that are focused only on paratroop operations. This literature does not take into account the activation of paratroops during the Second World War as a tactical revolution. An additional group is the memoirs of paratroopers at all levels of command. In this literature one can find in greater detail the training techniques and battle tactics of the paratroop forces and are therefore of great value in understanding the operational nature of those units.

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Dr. Tal Tovy is an assistant professor at the history department of Bar Ilan University, Israel.